


calendula officinalis

by thomasine



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Underground Dueling, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 00:24:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1724357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasine/pseuds/thomasine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He will not give them up. They are his brothers, and he will stay by their side.</p>
<p>(he is a child, foolish. there are reasons children cannot be guardians.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	calendula officinalis

**Author's Note:**

> for the zexal rarepair challenge, my first ship was haatov. set in the same universe as [iris](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1088046).

He will not give them up. They are his brothers, and he will stay by their side.

(he is a child, foolish. there are reasons children cannot be guardians.)

They run, the three of them. They run, and they hide in cheap motels that are no place for children, and he buys them pepper spray with the money for his own meals and tells them to lock the door fast whenever he's not there. Teaches them the way he'll knock before he enters, makes sure they know it by heart so he can trust that they'll defend themselves against anyone else.

There are whispers, in these parts of the city. Underground dueling - he doesn't know what that is until he sits in a shady bar on a fake ID, watches a duel where the duelists wear collars. One is a girl who looks barely older than him, in a white sun-dress that's left charred and smoking by the bands that grow white-hot around her skin as she's beaten mercilessly. It's brutal, her defeat, and she screams and screams and begs for the collars to be removed until he has to leave, has to void his stomach of its contents in a back alley behind the bar.

(she was due to be fired so they set her aflame, but he won't learn the finality of firing for months yet.)

The duels are brutal but they ask no questions. Nobody cares who you are - nobody wants to  _know_  who you are behind the masks you choose to show. So he follows them around, works little jobs for cash in hand. Mops the blood from the floors and cleans the collars and once, the worst night, tries for ten minutes to resuscitate a heel whose heart had given out from the shocks.

(they pull him away after that and they laugh, laugh at the little boy who thinks there's anything that's even worth saving down here.  _he's in a better place_ , a five tells him outside the warehouse that had hosted things that night, and blows smoke in his face;  _even hell'd be better than this_.)

He follows the duels around until he's told to work in one of the permanent venues. Just for a night, they tell him. Someone else is indisposed and nobody else wants to work, so all that's left is him. So he goes, and the jobs are the same but the air of the place is entirely different. This isn't a dingy bar or warehouse for the lowlifes and criminals of the city to watch people half-kill themselves with cards; this is the elite watching a spectacle, like gladiators fighting to the death. This is masked politicians and bankers and lawyers and more besides, watching heels and faces and cherubs and fives scream for them and bleed for them and win or lose for them in the cage, and at the head of it all sits the very man that the city is named for, casual and unmasked as he watches the duels without batting an eye at the worst parts of them.

He is caught, after the duels are done and most of the audience have left for their homes or hotel rooms or the back rooms of the venue itself. Heartland takes him aside and he  _knows_  him, knows his name and knows about their father's disappearance and says, "Everyone was so  **worried**  when you all disappeared, you know." Asks where his brothers are and somehow it's impossible to lie to Heartland, impossible to hide himself when he can see his face reflected in the lenses of those garish glasses.

"That simply won't do at all," Heartland tells him, one hand on his shoulder and the other hailing a car. "You'll come to the tower. All of you."

(if he were smarter, he would have run; if he were smarter, he never would have fallen into the spider's web at all, because by the time they reach the tower his chance to run has been gone hours past, from the very moment he walked into the venue and Heartland saw him.)

Heartland takes him up, out of the menial parts of the underground. Up to where he'll never have to enter the cage again - not to clean it, and certainly not to duel in it, as he'd feared now and then he might have to resort to for the extra money. Heartland dresses him up in fancy suits and lifts him up and lets him train one of Heartland's duelists in preparation for having one of his own, and in exchange takes his name away. Tells him it will be safer for his brothers that way anyway, and names him V, for the initial of his middle name.

(it feels wrong on him, like a badly-fitting glove, and he uses it only where he has to.)

There is more to the exchange than that, of course. Too many things given to be paid for with only a name, and besides that it's not as though Heartland truly gains anything from having it. He knows how the underground works, and he knows the kind of currency that they deal in, and so he only opens his mouth and takes what he's given.

(it occurs to him later, hunched over the sink in the bathroom and trying with bile and mouthwash to erase the lingering taste, that V is 'five', and he wonders whether Heartland would have found some excuse to call him that even without his middle name.)

The only times that are safe are the times with the duelist Heartland gave him. Who calls him V when it's necessary but calls him by name too, breathes his name into his skin and opens up beneath his fingers. Who looks at everything with wary, wild eyes but looks at him as though stars shine through him. _  
_

It's stupid, foolish, but he falls in love. They both do. They dance around one another and dare, perhaps, to think there's hope; to think there's an escape for them. That they can take their brothers and run away from this place, from the cage and the audiences and most of all from Heartland. He buys them a flower and says,  _it'll bloom for your birthday_ , and they honestly believe they can be gone by then. His birthday is near and Heartland has made insinuations about giving V a duelist of his own, and who else could it possibly be?

He's ready, when Heartland calls him on his birthday. They're prepared. Or they think so, anyway.

(they are children, and they are stupid, and nobody has ever beaten Heartland at his games - and if anyone ever does, it certainly won't be them.)

He isn't prepared for what Heartland tells him. Isn't prepared for whispers about Kaito's father in his ear, isn't prepared to be stripped down and spread open and told in a low, even voice that pushes past his own cries that Kaito is the son of the man who took their father away. That without Kaito's father, none of them would ever be here - here in the underground, here in Heartland's bed, here without any family to speak of but each other, three lost little children because  _Kaito's father_  took theirs away.

(he's burning up, he's dying, or  _Chris_  is at least, and he remembers the girl in the first underground duel he'd ever seen; he thinks 'fired' and he knows, now, months later and as a promoter in the making, what it is to  _fire_  someone in this place)

He's numb, by the end of it. Numb and cold and bruised and something is gone inside of him, something is missing so that there's nothing more than the badly-fitted glove that's V. Nothing more than what Heartland has made, has claimed, has owned and used.

And Heartland looks at him, then, splayed out and spread out and marked and dirtied on Heartland's bed. Looks at him and smiles like an artist admiring his finest work, before producing a yellow flower - one that he doesn't recognise now, but he'll come to know like his own name soon enough as marigold, as  _despair_ , _grief_ , _jealousy_ , _betrayal_  - and placing it down upon the bed beside him.

"Happy birthday, V."


End file.
